Everything you need to know about behavioral triggers to elevate your marketing strategy this year.
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Behavioral triggers are one of many factors that drive successful marketing strategies. They allow businesses to connect with customers on a personal level without requiring someone to be watching every digital interaction.
With the right tools, you can easily understand your customers on a deeper level and use real-time data to create behavioral trigger messages.
Whether that’s a cart abandonment message to increase revenue to a welcome campaign to nurture new audiences – it can all be done with behavioral triggers.
In this article, we’ll take a deeper dive into why behavioral triggers are so important for a successful marketing strategy and provide you with a few behavioral marketing tools you’ll want to consider.
Just here for the behavioral marketing tools? Here’s a look at the one’s we’ll cover:
- Listrak
- MailChimp
- Segment
- Hubspot
- Campaigner
- Autopilot
- Emma
Why Behavioral Triggers Are Important for Your Marketing Strategy
Behavioral marketing allows you to use real-time customer data to deliver more timely and relevant communication to each individual. By understanding exactly what your customers are interacting with and knowing what they need next, you can stay ahead of their ever-changing journey and meet them every step of the way.
Integrating behavioral triggers into your email and SMS marketing strategy will allow you to automatically engage audiences at the right moment with the right message. These messages are sent to customers based on the actions they took previously on your website or how they engaged with a previous marketing campaign.
Many benefits come with using behavioral triggers as part of your marketing strategy, including increasing customer engagement, connecting with customers throughout their purchasing journey, and providing you with a positive return on investment.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these to help you better understand how behavioral triggers can help elevate your marketing strategy.
They Will Increase Your Customer Engagement Metrics
Messages sent to customers based on their real-time behaviors and interactions will be more relevant to their immediate needs. Because of this, these messages are much more likely to capture the reader’s attention and encourage them to click to learn more.
Trigger emails are a great way to engage with your audiences and provide them with the most relevant content based on their real-time needs. Compared to traditional emails, they have a drastically higher open rate, which leads to more engagements and conversions. Image courtesy of Medium.
Think about your own email inbox. When you receive a message reminding you about a product you left in a shopping cart or a reminder that it’s time to refill your face wash, you’re more inclined to open that message.
Behavioral messages stand out in a customer’s inbox and are a nice relief from the hundreds of meaningless promotion emails they are receiving every day – they add a personal touch other emails can’t.
Personalization is an important element in today’s marketing world. 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product from a brand that provides a personalized experience. Using behavioral triggers is an excellent way to add that extra personal touch.
Using behavioral triggers as part of your marketing strategy will help increase customer engagement and bring your customers back to your site to complete a purchase.
They Allow You to Connect With Customer Across Various Touchpoints
Your customers move through several stages in their journey to completing a purchase. As they move through these different stages, you need to be communicating with them at every touchpoint.
Behavioral triggers are a great way to engage with your customer across multiple touchpoints successfully. They’ll allow you to automate your communication efforts and react to the changing needs of your customers in real-time.
There are many indicators that your customers are ready to move from one stage of the buying journey to the next. Listening and reacting to these changes will keep your brand top of mind and encourage the customer to make their purchase with you.
Throughout their purchasing journey, there are many factors that may influence their purchasing decision. From situational and personal factors to psychological and social – it’s all important to take into consideration when reacting to customer behavioral changes.
There are many things that your customers consider before making a purchase, and they can all have an impact on their final purchasing decision. Listening, understanding, and reacting to these different cues will allow you to send the most relevant behavioral messages to each customer. Image courtesy of Lumen.
Knowing when to connect with a customer based on their purchasing journey will provide you with the insight you need to make out of each interaction. Behavioral triggers allow you to automate this process and ensure you don’t miss an opportunity to connect with your customers at the most opportune moment.
They Provide You With a Positive Return on Investment
Behavioral triggers are well worth the investment and will positively affect your return on investment.
Since they are timely and relevant messages, your customers are much more likely to click-through and convert. This means that more people are coming to your website to complete a purchase or learn more about what you have to offer them.
There are also many strategic ways you can use behavioral triggers to increase revenue. By creating campaigns designed to cross-sell, share predictive product recommendations, and remind customers about products they left behind, you can quickly start seeing a positive return on investment with behavioral trigger campaigns.
When you give your customers what they want and send it to them when it’s most relevant to their immediate needs, they’re much more likely to complete a purchase. Having a behavioral marketing strategy in place will allow you to do this at scale successfully.
Types of Behavioral Trigger Campaigns You Should Be Using
When it comes to using behavioral triggers to create marketing campaigns, the possibilities are endless. You can use them to welcome new subscribers, let customers know when products they were interested in are back in stock, or re-engage inactive users.
Since customers will be enrolled in these campaigns based on their real-time interactions, the messages should resonate with them and encourage them to interact with the messages. Once you get them up and running, behavioral trigger messages can be some of your most successful campaigns.
Welcome Campaigns
Welcome campaigns are an effective way to interact with new audiences and begin to nurture them.
This campaign type is initiated when someone new subscribes to your marketing campaigns. After they’ve provided you with an email or text consent, you can automatically enroll them into your welcome campaign.
Reaching out to new audiences shortly after they subscribe to your content is a great way to increase open and click-through rates.
Welcome campaigns are a great way to interact with new audiences and start to build a relationship with them. This can lead to increased open and click-through rates and drive higher revenue. Image courtesy of CampaignMonitor.
It’s important to send welcome campaigns as soon as a new subscriber enrolls. Doing this through an automated campaign is the easiest way to ensure you’re connecting with the subscriber in a timely manner.
Beyond sending the message in a timely manner, these are a few additional best practices you’ll want to follow when sending welcome campaigns:
- Create unique welcome campaigns based on where the subscriber joined
- Review your welcome campaigns on a regular basis to keep them fresh and relevant
- Give the new subscriber something to do next such as view featured products
- Make sure your copy and design are focused, so the message is clear
Welcome campaigns are one of the most common types of behavioral trigger messages that companies use – and for a good reason. If you’re not already automatically enrolling your new audiences into a campaign that welcomes them to your list, now’s the time to start.
Re-engagement Campaigns
On the other hand, re-engagement campaigns are used to encourage existing, non-active subscribers to become active again. These audiences have had limited interaction, if any, over a set period of time and have been identified as at risk to churn.
Many companies set their re-engagement campaigns to target audiences who have not engaged with any messages over a 60 or 90 day period of time. This indicates that the user may no longer be interested in the content being sent but may be persuaded with the right offer.
When connecting with audiences who have been inactive for an extended period of time one effective way to re-engage them is by providing a special offer or incentive. This email does a great job at telling the customer why they’re reaching out and what the offer they have for them is. Image courtesy of Designmodo.
These audiences can be more challenging to reach, but here are a few tips to help you make the most out of your re-engagement campaigns:
- Write a catchy subject line that stands out in the subscriber’s inbox
- Incentivize the disengaged audiences with a discount or special offer
- Tell the subscribers what value you have to offer them
- Share recently content that may resonate with them based on past behaviors
If you have a long list of subscribers, but a large chunk of them are inactive, you’re not making the most out of your marketing campaigns. Identifying inactive subscribers and trying to re-engage them will open the opportunity for more sales and can be cheaper than attracting new customers.
Browse and Cart Abandonment Campaigns
Chances are good. You’ve likely received browse or cart abandonment emails before. These are another type of behavioral trigger campaign that can be extremely effective when done right.
Cart abandonment rates vary by industry, but more than 50% of people are leaving products behind no matter what industry you’re in. This presents you with an opportunity to reach these audiences and try to bring them back to complete their purchase. Image courtesy of Yieldify.
The average global rate of cart abandonment is 75.6%, which means you’re losing a lot of sales to people leaving your site without completing their purchases.
But, that also presents you with an opportunity.
You now know what your customers are interested in and the exact products they’re likely to purchase. This information will allow you to retarget them and remind them about the products they left behind but still might be thinking about.
Both browse and cart abandonment campaigns are triggered by the same behavior – leaving behind a customer’s product. By creating campaigns that invite that customer to come back and complete a purchase, these messages can directly impact and increase revenue.
Here are a few ideas to help you create highly engaging abandonment campaigns that encourage customers to convert:
- Send it at the right time, don’t wait too long or the customer may forget about the items
- Make sure it’s easy for the customer to get to their shopping cart and complete the purchase
- Don’t make the messages too salesy, or it may deter the customer
- Recommend related products to increase sales opportunities by cross-selling
If you haven’t already integrated abandonment trigger campaigns into your marketing strategy, this is a huge opportunity to win back sales and connect with your audiences on a personalized level.
Replenishment Campaigns
If you sell a product or service that requires customers to replenish or replace products over a period of time, you’ll want to integrate replenishment campaigns into your strategy.
These campaigns are meant to remind customers when it’s time to replace or replenish the product.
One prime example of this will be if you sell skincare products. You can identify the average time it takes customers to use the products and then send them a reminder to replenish their supply before they run out.
Sephora uses replenishment campaigns to re-engage customers and remind them that their products might be running low. They make it straightforward for the customer and simplify the add-to-cart process. Image courtesy of ClickZ.
When a customer sees this type of message in their inbox, they are more likely to purchase it because it’s relevant and timely for them – especially if they really are almost out of the product.
It’s important to remember that you can’t stop nurturing a customer just because they have already completed a purchase. To continue growing the relationship and working towards building loyalty, you need to continue to engage with them and provide the content they need.
Replenishment campaigns are another great way to do this and bring customers back to your site even after they’ve completed their initial purchase.
7 of the Best Behavioral Marketing Tools
To successfully run your behavioral trigger campaigns, you’ll want to have the right marketing tool. Creating automated campaigns without assistance from an automated tool would be nearly impossible and would suck up all the time in your day.
Investing in a platform that can help gather, listen, and react to customer data in real-time will make your behavioral trigger dreams possible.
There are many tools available today that can help you connect with your audiences through behavioral marketing, but a few stand out from the crowd. In this section, we’ll take a look at seven tools you’ll want to consider and give you a quick overview of each.
From there, you can choose which tools sound like the right fit for your needs so you can start narrowing down your list and reaching out for more detailed demos.
1. Listrak
Listrak is a leading cross-channel marketing platform that gives you everything you need to create highly successful behavioral trigger campaigns and so much more. From cart and browse recovery to replenishment and price drop messages – Listrak can help you elevate your behavioral marketing efforts.
Knowing when your customers are ready for more products is a great way to create personalized experiences that drive increased sales. By timing these messages based on previous purchases, your customer will be thanking you for the reminder and landing you a sale. Image courtesy of Listrak.
Platform Highlights:
- Advanced behavioral trigger capabilities that listens and responds to individual customer signals and turn them into actionable touchpoints
- Customer journey mapping allows you to connect with your customers across various channels and at every touchpoint along their purchasing journey
- Campaign automation capabilities to make it easier and more effective to reach your customers at scale with personalized, relevant experiences
- Detailed customer insights that allow you to better understand and visualize each customer on a personal level and provide them with a customized experience
“The growth of our online business has been off the charts, thanks to Listrak. Their solutions have taken us to the next level very quickly.”
Pricing:
Pricing for the Listrak platform is customized based on business needs. You will need to speak with a company representative to understand what pricing looks like for your needs.
2. MailChimp
MailChimp is a marketing automation platform that makes it easy to connect with your audiences and send highly relevant behavioral triggers. With the right segmentation and customer data, you can know you’re reaching the right people at the right time.
Stay connected with your customers no matter what your service is. By sending automated follow-up messages you can start to build stronger relationships with your customers and encourage them to purchase with loyalty programs. Image courtesy of MailChimp.
Platform Highlights:
- Use behavioral data from your website to create relevant marketing campaigns based on how your customers are interacting and where they’re browsing on your site
- Target your audiences more effectively with the right segmentation tools that help you understand what content to send to what audience groups
- Automate your marketing efforts to connect with more customers at scale and react to their changing wants and needs
- Create cross-channel marketing experiences that keep your audiences engaged from one stage to the next
MailChimp Customer Testimonial:
“We’re using the API to bring in real-time user behavior we can act on. Mailchimp has been a huge part in offering our community personalization at scale.”
Pricing:
There are multiple plan options available based on what your business needs are and the number of contacts you have. Plans include the Free plan, the Essentials plan starting at $11, the Standard plan starting at $17, and the Premium plan starting at $299.
3. Segment
Segment is a customer data platform that provides businesses with a wide range of products and solutions, including behavioral trigger capabilities. This tool will provide you with everything you need to collect, understand, and react to the interaction of each of your customers in real time.
By tracking and understanding the actions of your customers, you can easily create personalized experiences that encourage them to engage with your content. These interactions can then lead customers to come back to your site and complete a purchase or look for another product. Image courtesy of Segment.
Platform Highlights:
- Automatically connect with customers in real-time with behavioral triggers like cart abandonment messages, targeted ads, and omnichannel messages
- Create personalized emails that provide relevant recommendations based on customer behaviors and previous shopping habits
- Optimize offers and drive increased revenue by predicting the likelihood that someone will complete a purchase
- House all of your customer data in one place to ensure it’s consistent and accurate across all channels and marketing messages
“With real-time integrated data flows from Segment, we can truly understand what people are doing with our platform.”
Pricing:
There are three plan options available for the Segment platform including the Free plan, the Team plan starting at $120 per month, and the Business plan with customized pricing based on business needs.
4. Hubspot
Hubspot is a well-known marketing automation platform that can help your business reach your customers with more personalized messages and integrate behavioral triggers into your marketing strategy. From increased lead generation to marketing automation, Hubspot is a reliable product for any business.
When someone joins your subscriber list, it’s important to enroll them in a welcome campaign to help nurture them. This type of behavioral trigger can easily be done with the Hubspot platform to keep new subscribers engaged. Image courtesy of Hubspot.
Platform Highlights:
- Use real-time customer data to know how your customers are engaging with your website and content to send the most relevant messages through behavioral triggers
- Create personalized buyer journeys that move your customers towards completing a purchase with messages tailored to their individual needs along the way
- Tap into your CRM data to create more personalized emails that engage and convert more leads
- Automate nurturing and behavioral trigger-based marketing campaigns to continue building relationships and keeping your brand top of mind
“The HubSpot CMS Hub has helped us marry our digital strategy into a more holistic approach. Now we’re really thinking about the whole lifecycle of a buyer, and not just one piece of media that may or may not be effective. Instead, we’re really trying to have multiple digital touchpoints with that client to engage them deeper than you would with traditional methods.”
Pricing:
There are multiple plan options available for the Hubspot platform including the Free plan, the Started plan starting at $45 per month, the Professional plan starting at $800 per month, and the Enterprise plan starting at $3,200 per month.
5. Campaigner
Campaigner is a multi-channel marketing automation tool that will allow you to connect with your customers on a more personalized level and continue to drive sales and revenue. This platform will allow you to create behavioral trigger campaigns with both email and SMS messaging to make the most out of every customer interaction.
Understanding how each of your customers interacts with your brand and purchase from your website allows you to make the most out of every interaction. These personalized experiences can be triggered based on their recent behaviors and help to drive a higher return on investment for each message. Image courtesy of Campaigner.
Platform Highlights:
- Track customer behaviors such as products purchased, amount spend, and more to identify new opportunities such as cross-selling or re-engagement campaigns
- Easily create targeted messages based on customer data and segmentation efforts that allow you to send relevant, personalized offers
- Create messages that utilize dynamic content to ensure each message is unique and provides customized content based on each customers interests
- Understand what campaigns are most successful with conversion tracking and analytics that tell you exactly what content your audiences are most engaged with
“Overall, we are extremely satisfied on what this software allows us to do from a campaign standpoint. Our emails are clean and easy to read on mobile devices and on the desktop.”
Pricing:
There are several plan options available with the Campaigner platform, and pricing varies depending on if you need email and SMS or just email. The plan options available for both include the Starter plan costing $104 per month, the Essential plan costing $224 per month, and the Advanced plan costing $694 per month.
6. Autopilot
Autopilot is a marketing platform that brings together all of your customer data and makes it simple to create comprehensive experiences across channels and platforms. This platform captures the data you need to create behavioral marketing campaigns that convert.
Create welcome campaigns to engage new subscribers and understand how each message is performing with the analytics you need to determine success. Then, build more comprehensive journeys that move subscribers towards completing a purchase. Image courtesy of Autopilot.
Platform Highlights:
- Create personalized journeys for each customer with demographic and behavioral data to ensure every message is relevant
- Send messages on multiple channels to connect with audiences where they’re most active and get your message seen
- Tap into AI technology to help you create better emails with email subject line and SMS message suggestions
- Have access to the customer data and campaign analytics you need to improve your marketing efforts over time
Autopilot Customer Testimonial:
“On Autopilot, we’ve in a short period built an omnichannel program that would have taken years – or simply been impossible with any other software.”
Pricing:
There are multiple plan options available, including the Free plan, the Campaign plan starting at $29 per month, the Professional plan starting at $99 per month, the Business plan starting at $299 per month, and the Enterprise plan with customized pricing based on business needs.
7. Emma
The Emma platform is an email marketing tool that will help you reach your audiences every step of the way with targeted messages. With the ability to connect customer data and build relevant audiences, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to send your customers the messages they want and need.
Platform Highlights:
- Know when your customers have visited your website, completed a purchase, or interacted with another form of content and create behavioral triggered messages
- Create intuitive audience segmentation that allows you to provide personalized experience to more customers at scale
- Use A/B testing to know exactly what resonates with your customers and where you can improve content to be more relevant
- Gather all of the analytical data you need on your campaigns to measure success and identify opportunities for growth
“Emma is a truly impactful and very simple tool that we are using for creating effective marketing campaigns. We use it daily for creating more interactive, personalized emails, automated emails, and landing pages with less effort and in less time. Emma offers a lot of useful information that is easy to find, and they also make it simple to establish different audience segments and personalized campaigns for multiple customers and specific ones. If we have any problems, Emma’s support staff is always fast to reply and assist us.”
Pricing:
The pricing for this platform is customized based on business needs. You’ll need to speak with a company representative to learn more.
Start Integrating Behavioral Triggers Into Your Marketing Strategy Today
So what are you waiting for? Behavioral trigger messages are one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers and give them the content they want and need.
By integrating things like welcome series, abandonment messages, and replenishment campaigns, you can easily increase customer engagement and increase your return on investment. Making the investment in behavioral triggered campaigns isn’t something you’ll regret.
